Short answers, pulled from the story.
GameSpot was founded on the 1st of May 1996 by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady, and Jon Epstein. These three former employees of IDG launched the website under SpotMedia Communications, which they had established in January 1996.
Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot on the 28th of November 2007 after giving the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men a score of 6 out of 10. The advertiser Eidos Interactive threatened to pull advertising revenue, and a non-disclosure agreement nullified in March 2012 confirmed the firing was a direct result of this pressure.
Chris Wanstrath left GameSpot in 2008 to start GitHub, which he sold to Microsoft for 7.5 billion dollars in 2018. Danny O'Dwyer founded the crowdfunded game documentary company Noclip in 2016, while Greg Kasavin became a creative director at Supergiant Games.
In 2007, GameSpot introduced a unified overall score with half-point increments, replacing the initial categorical breakdown. By 2013, the scale shifted to integer values only, categorizing scores as Masterpiece, Superb, Great, Good, Fair, Mediocre, Poor, Bad, Terrible, or Abysmal.
GameSpot UK was launched in October 1997 and operated until mid-2002 before being merged with the main U.S. site. It was relaunched on the 24th of April 2006 following the purchase of ZDNet by CNET.